Beating an Old Drum October 27, 2012
Posted by Heather Mark in cybersecurity, Data Breach, Industry News, InfoSec & Privacy.Tags: cybersecurity, data security, Dr. Heather Mark, Heather Mark, InfoSec, mark consulting group, privacy, security
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It’s the end of what has already been a tough year for data security. And the news just got worse. South Carolina has announced that its Department of Revenue suffered a major breach. The breach is so massive, in fact that more than 75% of the state’s residents have been affected. The compromised data consisted of the (unencrypted) social security numbers of more than 3.6 million residents. Also included in the breach were about 390,000 payment cards. Most of those were encrypted, though.
This is disturbing on a number of levels. I find it curious, for example, that while encryption was deployed, it was only deployed on payment cards (and not even on all of those). Consumers have built in protections on payment cards. As long as those cards are branded by one of the major card brands, consumers are protected against liability for fraudulent transactions. The far more sensitive data, the social security numbers, were not encrypted, though. This defies logic. Consumers have little to no protection against misuse of SSNs. Not only can very real financial damage be done, consumers have to spend enormous resources (time, money, emotions) in untangling the identity theft knot that comes with stolen SSNs.
Secondly, in the wake of the breach, Governor Nikki Haley issued an executive order that read: “I hereby direct all cabinet agencies to immediately designate an information technology officer to cooperate with the State Inspector General who is authorized to make recommendations to improve information security policies and procedures in state agencies.” WHAT? If I’m inferring correctly, it seems that these agencies didn’t have an information technology officer already?? That is very troubling, particularly considering the types of data that state agencies hold. After 3.6 million (out of about 4.7 million) residents have had their sensitive data stolen is not a great time to decide that data security and privacy should become priority.
Private sector organizations have been working for years to shore up their data security, and in some cases (PCI DSS, HIPAA/HITECH, GLBA, SOX, state laws) face real consequences for failure to protect that data. It’s long past time states put forth the same level of protection. On the plus side, the state did comply nicely with its own data breach notification law.
Because I Said So September 23, 2012
Posted by Heather Mark in cybersecurity, Industry News, InfoSec & Privacy, Laws and Leglslation, Politics.Tags: cybercrime, cybersecurity, data security, Dr. Heather Mark, Heather Mark, InfoSec
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Last week, Democratic leaders made some minor news when they sent a letter to President Obama suggesting that he issue an executive order on Cybersecurity. Their position is that, since Congress seems to be at loggerheads over the issue, the president should take the opportunity to force action by issuing an Executive Order. In fact, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano told a congressional committee that just such an order was in its final stages. So what might we see in this forthcoming order?
According to reports, the order will attempt to regulate sixteen “critical” industries. The guidelines will be voluntary, after a fashion. Compliance with the standards may determine eligibility for federal contracts. The White House has not made any secret about its intentions on Cybersecurity. In fact, the White House website lists “Ten Near Term Actions to Support Our Cybersecurity Strategy.” Brevity prevents me from getting into a deep discussion about those actions here, but you can read them and draw your own conclusions.
The questions remain, however – 1) how stringent (read intrusive) will the requirements be?; 2) Will they be relevant to the threats in the landscape?; 3) How will compliance be policed? and 4) How much additional cost are we potentially adding our already stretched budgets?
Another question that merits examination is whether or not the standards will be redundant. Many industries are already straining under the weight of a variety of infosec requirements – whether industry-regulated or government mandated? Will another layer of regulation mean increased efficacy of data protection strategies and mandates or will it be just another layer of red tape?
“Why does the FBI have your UDID (and 12.4 million more)?” FBI Laptop Hacked…1 million Apple IDS posted online September 4, 2012
Posted by Chris Mark in cyberespionage, cybersecurity.Tags: anonymous, Apple, Christopher Stangl, Cyber Action Team, data breach, fbi, Hacked, mark consulting group, UDID
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*UPDATE* It was reported yesterday that the FBI laptop was not, in fact, the source of UUIDs that were hacked. A company called Blue Toad revealed that it was the source of the stolen ids. It’s not clear how the data was stolen from Blue Toad or what, if any relationship exists between the company and the laptop that was first identified as the source of the breach.***
According to NBC News, hackers associated with the anti-government group AntiSec have hacked an FBI Agent’s laptop and posted over 1 million Apple Unique Device Identification Number or UDIDs online. The Apple UDID is used by Apple to determine what applications are running and to lock down the phones, IPads and computers from other applications. Alone, they do not represent personally identifiable information but However, New Zealand-based security researcher Aldo Cortesi has shown that thanks to disregard of Apple’s security guidelines by iOS game and app developers, it’s possible to determine a user’s identity through an UDID alone. According to the story:
“The Pastebin post claims that the UDIDs were stolen thanks to an Anonymous hack into the laptop of FBI agent Christopher Stangl, a member of a New York-based cybercrime task force. “During the second week of March 2012, a Dell Vostro notebook, used by Supervisor Special Agent Christopher K. Stangl from FBI Regional Cyber Action Team and New York FBI Office Evidence Response Team was breached using the AtomicReferenceArray vulnerability on Java,” the posting states. “During the shell session some files were downloaded from his Desktop folder one of them with the name of ‘NCFTA_iOS_devices_intel.csv’ turned to be a list of 12,367,232 Apple iOS devices including Unique Device Identifiers (UDID), user names, name of device, type of device, Apple Push Notification Service tokens, zipcodes, cellphone numbers, addresses, etc. the personal details fields referring to people appears many times empty leaving the whole list incompleted on many parts.”
Why the FBI has such a list of over 12 million UDIDs is an interesting question. Why the list would be on a laptop is another interesting question. To check whether your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch’s UDID might be among those affected, a Unix developer based in Florida has already posted a tool: http://kimosabe.net/test.html
“Cyber Espionage is Alive and Well”; Motorola Employee Sentenced in theft of IP August 30, 2012
Posted by Chris Mark in cyberespionage, cybersecurity.Tags: china, cyber espionage, cybercrime, cybersecurity, Hanjuan Jin, information security, mark consulting group, motorola, security
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According to a story in CIO, a former Motorola employee was sentenced to 4 years in prison for theft of trade secrets. For more information on the cyber espionage threat, you can read my article: “The Rise of CyberEspionage” published in The Counter Terrorist Magazine.
Below is an excerpt of the CIO article.
“Hanjuan Jin, 41, a nine-year Motorola software engineer, conducted a “purposeful raid to steal technology,” U.S. District Judge Ruben Castillo said while imposing the sentence, according to a statement by the department.
The Judge did not however find her guilty of three counts of economic espionage for the benefit of China and its military, although he found by a preponderance of the evidence, that Jin “was willing to betray her naturalized country,” according to the department. Jin had earlier been convicted by the court of three counts of theft of trade secrets.
Judge Castillo’s order was not immediately available on the website of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division where Jin was on trial.
Jin, who is a naturalized U.S. citizen born in China, was stopped from traveling on a one-way ticket to China on Feb. 28, 2007 at O’Hare International Airport by U.S. customs officials who are said to have seized from her possession more than 1,000 electronic and paper documents from Motorola.”
Companies need to be vigilant and understand that the same techniques used to steal national secrets are being employed in US businesses. While not exclusive to China, they certainly represent the greatest threat today.
“Here I (we) go Again…”; GlobalCerts.net hacked August 27, 2012
Posted by Chris Mark in cybersecurity.Tags: anonymous, cyber war news, data breach, globalcert.net, hack, mark consulting group, PCI DSS, security
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On this lovely Monday morning on the opening week of College Football (WAR EAGLE!)…I open with some classic Whitesnake and their awesome song from 1987: “Here I go Again”. It seemed appropriate since here ‘we’ go again with another hack and data compromise. According to Cyber War News, GlobalCert.net was hacked and their data posted to Pastebin..according to the report, GlobalCert.net’s web database was hacked and over 1000 clients’ data posted online by Anonymous. GlobalCert.net’s website says the following about their website:
“GlobalCerts provides a comprehensive solution that meets a full range of secure messaging needs—including an automatic, transparent, inter-organizational secure messaging product, the SecureMail Gateway. GlobalCerts also offers a trusted, scalable, user friendly solution to overcome the hurdle obstructing many organizations from deploying a standards-based, secure messaging solution. SecureTier is a hands-off global, certificate management solution for key creation, discovery, and revocation. No other key distribution and discovery system is as effortless and efficient as GlobalCerts’ solution.”
Seems that GlobalCert.net should practice what they preach 😉
